Shhan in the City
How do different memories and imaginings become a single scene?
Shhan in the City combines urban landscapes personally experienced and photographed by the artist with photographs of a real cat and drawn beings. Memories from different times and places meet imaginings that never existed within a single scene, creating new memories that move between reality and fiction.
Shhan in the City is a series of six digital images that combines photographs of cities SHHAN personally visited and photographed with giant cats and imagined beings. Drawing on the monster films and animation he has loved since childhood, he imagined what kind of scene might emerge if a cat as large as a kaiju appeared in the middle of a city he had actually walked through.
Reality and fiction in this project, however, cannot be divided simply into photography and drawing. A place personally experienced, a cat who shared the artist’s life, characters created in other works, and images from popular culture remembered since childhood all bring memories and imaginings from different sources together within a single frame.
The first work, Victoria Harbour, combines a photograph of Victoria Harbour taken by SHHAN in Hong Kong with a photograph of the real Niki. The city exists, and Niki also exists. Both images are records of realities the artist personally experienced and photographed.
Yet the scene created by combining these two realities never existed. There was never a moment when Niki lay with a body larger than the buildings of Victoria Harbour. Two memories of things that actually existed meet to produce a scene that never did.
Later works extend this method in several directions. Across landscapes of Osaka, Zhuhai, Hainan, Seoul, and Hong Kong photographed by SHHAN, real photographs, drawings, characters from other projects, and imagined beings are combined in different ways. The photographs and drawings are adjusted and joined until they appear to have belonged to one scene from the beginning.
In Rain in Osaka, Witch from another SHHAN project, 《The SHHAN》, rides through the city on the back of a giant cat. By inviting a being from an entirely different fictional world into a photograph of Osaka that he personally visited and photographed, a place experienced in reality and a world made within the work meet in one scene.
The giant cat is far larger than the buildings and the city, yet it destroys nothing like a conventional monster. It stands on rooftops, looks over the city, lies between buildings, or moves while carrying another being on its back. Ordinary feline behavior is enlarged to an impossible scale, transforming a familiar city into another kind of space.
In the work set in Hong Kong, this combination expands further. Within a real urban landscape, SHHAN’s giant cat confronts Eva Unit-01 from Neon Genesis Evangelion. A city the artist experienced, a being made in his own work, and a cultural memory he has long cherished meet within an event that could never occur in reality.
It is therefore difficult to say simply that photography represents reality and drawing represents fiction in Shhan in the City. Combining a photograph of a real city with a photograph of the real Niki still produces an event that never happened. Conversely, a drawn being can appear to have existed once it enters a photograph that records an actual experience.
The photographs record SHHAN’s physical presence in those places, while Niki carries the personal memory of a being with whom he lived. Characters from other works hold memories of the worlds he has created, and monster films and animation carry cultural memories extending from childhood into the present. Experiences formed in different times and places come to share the same time and space within Shhan in the City.
Rather than recording events that actually happened, Shhan in the City is a project that recombines memories of what existed with imaginings of what did not, creating new scenes absent from reality.